by Paul Preston
Three days later, on 1 August, the national committee of the CNT issued a manifesto which declared that ‘no rifle should be silent as long as there exists a single fascist in Spain’.18
That anarchist violence would continue uncontrolled was ensured by the fact that, under the CCMA, the Departament d’Investigació which was responsible for public order was headed by the FAI extremist Aurelio Fernández Sánchez. He secured the removal of the efficient Federico Escofet as head of security because of his determination to control the FAI. In every town and village, there was created a defence or revolutionary anti-fascist committee the bulk of which were dominated by members of the CNT or the FAI. Fernández delegated power to ‘control and security teams’, known as Patrulles de Control, of which seven hundred were created within a week. Their composition reflected the fact that most committed anarchists were repelled by the idea of acting as policemen and preferred to fight at the battle front. Thus the armed members of the patrols were made up of a mixture of extremists committed to the elimination of the old bourgeois order and some recently released common criminals. In the main, they acted arbitrarily, searching and often looting houses, arresting people denounced as right-wing and often killing them. As a result, by early August, over five hundred civilians had been murdered in Barcelona. Aurelio Fernández authorized an assault on the prison ship Uruguay which saw many right-wing prisoners murdered.19
Sometimes, when the defence committees of given localities wanted some criminal act carried out, they would arrange for it to be done by patrols from other towns on a reciprocal basis. A so-called ‘ghost car’ would arrive from a neighbouring town or district equipped with blacklists that can only have been provided by local elements. This accounts for the impunity with which outsiders could arrive, burn a church and arrest or kill local people. There were many motorized squads or brigades whose vehicles reflected the FAI’s penchant for luxury saloons. They were often headed by men with criminal records, usually for armed robbery, appointed by Aurelio Fernández. Among the more notorious were the one-time bank robber Joaquim Aubí, alias ‘El Gordo’, who drove the ghost car of Badalona; Josep Recasens i Oliva, alias ‘El Sec de la Matinada’, whose group operated in Tarragona; Jaume Martí Mestres from Mora la Nova, whose group was active in the villages along the banks of the River Ebre; and Francesc Freixenet i Alborquers who dominated the area around Vic in the north of the province of Barcelona. Freixenet, with his accomplices Pere Agut Borrell and Vicenç Coma Cruells, known as ‘the cripple of the road to Gurb’, ran a fleet of six ghost cars, maintained by his family’s garage and paid for by the municipality. Their main targets were members of the clergy.20
One of the most feared of such itinerant groups was led by Pascual Fresquet Llopis and operated in the so-called ‘death’s-head car’. Fresquet was twenty-nine years old and known for his violent temper. He had been imprisoned in the early 1930s for armed robbery and intimidated or murdered recalcitrant industrialists on the instructions of the FAI.21 At the beginning of the war, he joined the anarchist column from Barcelona led by the charismatic ex-carpenter Antonio Ortiz of the FAI. Ortiz’s base was Caspe in the south of Zaragoza, a small town which had initially been taken for the rebels by Captain José Negrete at the head of forty Civil Guards. The fact that Negrete had used Republican women and children as human shields ensured that, after the town was occupied on 25 July by Ortiz’s column, the reprisals would be ferocious with fifty-five local rightists executed before the month was out. The prominent part played by Fresquet’s group led Ortiz to give them the title of ‘brigada de investigación’ with carte blanche to hunt down fascists. Their death’s-head car was actually a black, thirty-five-seat charabanc decorated with skulls. The brigade had a skull embroidered on their caps and a metal skull-badge pinned to their chests.22
In early August, Fresquet flushed out some of the remaining right-wingers of Caspe. Before dawn, his men ran into the streets firing shots and shouting rebel slogans. Optimistic that the town was being taken by rebel forces from Zaragoza, four or five rightists came out of hiding, brandishing weapons. They were immediately detained and shot. Thereafter, Fresquet’s group, known as the ‘Death Brigade’, spread terror through the area of Lower Aragon, Teruel and Tarragona. They moved eastwards, first to Fabara where they killed fifteen right-wingers, and then north to Riba-roja d’Ebre where they killed eight people on 5 September and another eight at Flix in Tarragona the following day. They then headed south to Mora d’Ebre where the local committee prevented them killing anyone.23
From Mora d’Ebre, they moved west to Gandesa where, on the night of 12 and the morning of 13 September, they executed twenty-nine rightists. Fresquet had the red and black flag of the FAI flown over the town hall and then harangued the town’s inhabitants as he declared libertarian communism. In the afternoon of 13 September, they went east to Falset, at the base of the steep wine-growing Priorat area in Tarragona, where an identical sequence of events was seen. Arriving in the bus and two large black cars, Fresquet and about forty-five of his men immediately detained the local ERC–UGT anti-fascist committee and sealed off roads into the town. Between nightfall and the following morning, on the basis of lists prepared by local members of the FAI, they arrested and executed twenty-seven right-wingers in the cemetery. Fresquet then assembled the entire population of the village and, under the black and red flag of the FAI, made a speech from the balcony of the town hall. He justified the killings by saying that his squad had been asked to come and ‘impose justice’. The local FAI had indeed called him in to accelerate the imposition of libertarian communism and immediately there began massive confiscations of land.24
The next stop of the Death Brigade was Reus. However, the local anti-fascist committee had been warned of their arrival. Led by Josep Banqué i Martí of the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya (PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party), Communists, Socialists and even anarchists agreed to act in concert. On arrival, Fresquet himself went first to the headquarters of the committee and told Banqué that his column had come to carry out a purge of fascists. As Banqué was telling him that his services were not required, Fresquet was informed by one of his lieutenants that their convoy had been surrounded by local militiamen in the main square, La Plaça de Prim. The Death Brigade was forced to leave and a bloodbath like those at Gandesa and Falset prevented. Eventually, in late October 1936, the CNT would clamp down on the activities of Fresquet because they were bringing the organization into disrepute. By that time, Fresquet’s busload of killers had executed around three hundred people.25 As Josep Maria Planes had pointed out in the articles for which he was murdered, it was difficult to distinguish between idealistic revolutionary fervour and plain criminality. The Patrulles de Control all over Catalonia were also giving the CNT a bad name but little was done precisely because they were being administered by Aurelio Fernández, an extremely senior figure in the movement.
Under his overall control, the Central Patrol Committee was run by its secretary general, another FAI member, Josep Asens Giol. Asens, aided by Dionís Eroles i Batlle, would issue orders for investigation and detention. Until they were dissolved after the events of May 1937, the patrols took exclusive responsibility for rooting out pro-rebel elements in the rearguard. Behind this function, crimes were committed for personal gain, revenge or class hatred by the notorious group known as ‘Eroles’s Boys’. There were a few of the patrols controlled by other parties such as those run out of the Hotel Colón by the PSUC. There were also numerous completely separate autonomous groups with their own private prisons or checas. Fernández, Asens and Eroles had no qualms about using criminal elements, believing them to be victims of bourgeois society. Together, they presided over a network of terror throughout Catalonia. It has been alleged that Aurelio Fernández and one of his closest collaborators, Vicente Gil ‘Portela’, were guilty of sexual crimes. Another sinister FAI figure was Manuel Escorza del Val, head of the CNT–FAI counter-espionage service who used his units to elim
inate any perceived enemies of the movement.26
Escorza’s Investigation Committee, as it was called, was set up in August. The portrayal of revolutionary terrorism in the right-wing press throughout Europe, together with diplomatic protests, brought pressure from the Madrid government, from the Generalitat and from the Comité Central de Milicias Antifascistas for an end to the ‘disorder’. The CNT leadership was fearful that complaints about disorder could be a device to generate a desire for a return to the old state structures and initially set up Escorza’s committee to investigate the excesses. Operating from the wheelchair to which he was confined by paralysis, Escorza was described by García Oliver as ‘that lamentable cripple, of mind as well as of body’. The secretary of the CCMA and later Generalitat press chief, Jaume Miravitlles, remembered him as ‘the implacable and incorruptible Robespierre of the FAI’. In contrast, Miravitlles’s colleague, Joan Pons Garlandí, regarded Escorza as ‘head of the uncontrolled elements of the FAI’. The anarchist Federica Montseny, later to be Spain’s first ever female minister, described Escorza as the Felix Dzerzhinsky of the Spanish revolution. The brutality of his methods provoked in her ‘considerable anxiety not to say anguish’. From his office on the top floor of CNT headquarters in the Via Laetana, he used his huge file-card index to pursue rightists and criminals from within the ranks of anarchism.27
An early example of Escorza’s work was the case of Josep Gardenyes Sabaté, a notoriously violent and uncontrollable thug. He had not been amnestied when the Popular Front came to power but, on 19 July, had been released along with other common criminals. With a group of comrades, he became an FAI ‘expropriator’ guilty of murder and looting. As early as 30 July, the CNT–FAI issued a statement that anyone undertaking unauthorized house searches and acts that compromised the new revolutionary order would be shot. Some days afterwards, on 3 August, Gardenyes and some members of his gang were detained and executed without trial. This caused outrage within certain sectors of the anarcho-syndicalist movement.28
Gardenyes enjoyed cult status within the movement, having earned his spurs during the period of unrestrained gangsterism between 1918 and 1923. He was one of the most prominent of the so-called ‘men of action’, specializing in fund-raising by armed robbery. He was a committed and ideological anarchist, blacklisted by Barcelona employers for his efforts. Having been exiled then imprisoned during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, he was released as a result of the amnesty to celebrate the establishment of the Second Republic in April 1931 and soon returned to robbery. Some of his comrades found his behaviour too extreme and he was expelled from the movement. After his release from prison, he joined the Patrulles de Control and soon reverted to old habits, allegedly stealing jewels from a house that was being searched.
Gardenyes’s execution was the response of the CNT–FAI leadership to demands for an end to the revolutionary terrorism. His execution was carried out by a group led by Manuel Escorza, and the body was dumped on the outskirts of Barcelona. It was rumoured that Gardenyes struggled to the last, some of his fingernails being left in the car that took him on his final journey.29 The Madrid-based anarchist Felipe Sandoval, a notorious and vicious killer in his own right, described Escorza to his own Francoist interrogators as ‘a twisted figure, physically and morally a monster, a man whose methods disgusted me’.30
The activities of Escorza did nothing to reassure the moderate elements alarmed by anarchist atrocities. The Generalitat’s efforts to save lives were more effective. Safe-conducts were issued to Catholics, businessmen, right-wingers, middle-class individuals and clergy. Passports were made available for well over 10,000 right-wingers to embark on foreign ships in the port of Barcelona. Passports with false names were issued for people whose real identities might have put them in danger. In 1939, the French government reported that in the course of the civil war, in collaboration with the Generalitat, its Consulate in Barcelona had evacuated 6,630 people, of whom 2,142 were priests, monks and nuns, and 868 children. On 24 August 1936, Mussolini’s Consul in Barcelona, Carlo Bossi, reported that 4,388 Spaniards had been evacuated in Italian warships.31
Few of the beneficiaries showed gratitude. One of them was the wealthy financier Miquel Mateu i Pla, who, on reaching the rebel zone, formed part of Franco’s staff. After Barcelona was occupied in 1939, on the recommendation of Father Juan Tusquets, Franco appointed Mateu as Mayor. Mateu’s policies suggested that he wished to take revenge on the entire population for his discomfort at the hands of the FAI.32
A difference between the practice in Catalonia and that in the rebel zone was the way in which the corpses of the victims of extra-judicial violence were treated. In Barcelona, the relatives of the victims were able to ascertain the fate of their loved ones. The Red Cross, the municipal sanitation services or the staff of the judiciary took the corpses found in the streets to the hospital clinic where they were photographed and numbered. To avoid any such investigations, the FAI patrols established crematoriums in order to dispose of the bodies of their victims. Sometimes the bodies would be burned with gasoline, others dissolved in lime. At other times, bodies were concealed in wells or buried in remote spots.
While the Patrulles de Control ruled the streets in Barcelona, as elsewhere, to be identified as a priest, a religious, a militant Catholic or even a member of a pious society was to be in danger of death or prison – a consequence of the Church’s traditional identification with the right. During the events of October 1934, there had been isolated physical attacks on priests in Barcelona. Further south, in Vilanova i la Geltrú, the Church of the Immaculate Conception was looted and destroyed. All but two of the churches of Vilafranca del Penedès were set alight. During the spring of 1936, there were cases of stones being thrown at priests in the streets, parish residences being assaulted and religious ceremonies being violently disrupted.33 During the war, the FAI’s persecution of religious personnel in Catalonia intensified.
Churches were sacked and burned to the ground. Initially, priests in cassocks were murdered on the street. Later, priests and those who assisted in ecclesiastical functions, sacristans and parish administrators, as well as the most notably pious lay Catholics, were arrested, principally by the FAI. They were executed after interrogation in the checa to which they had been taken. Many priests fled or went into hiding. A post-war report compiled by the Diocese of Barcelona ascertained that many of the abuses against both clergy and churches, although organized by local extremists, were actually carried out by elements from outside. There were many places where the local faithful opposed the assaults on their churches but sometimes, in order to save the clergy, had to accept, or even collaborate in, setting fire to the church. Equally, there were many cases where the local Popular Front Committee prevented the murder of the clergy and facilitated their escape. In Valls, a small town in Tarragona, the altars of most churches were destroyed and the buildings used as garages and agricultural warehouses. One especially valuable seventeenth-century altar was saved by local FAI members who were descendants of the sculptor who had built it. Nevertheless, twelve priests were murdered in the town.34
According to the diocesan report, there were many towns, such as Granollers or Sitges, where the local committee organized anti-clerical excesses. In the case of Vilanova i la Geltrú, since the local right had played no part in the military coup and was caught unawares, left-wing reprisals were less ferocious than in other places. Nonetheless, trucks loaded with armed men arrived from Barcelona and forced religious personnel to leave their churches, monasteries and convents. Religious buildings were looted but none burned to the ground. Nevertheless, all public liturgical practice was curtailed. The Property Registry was sacked and much documentation burned. The town was under the control of a CNT militia committee. There were other uncontrolled elements that moved around in another ghost car looting houses and making unauthorized arrests. Many murders were committed by elements who came from outside but had links with leftists within the town. Of those killed
by the patrols in Vilanova i la Geltrú, only four were priests. In contrast, over half of those killed in Lleida in the five weeks following the military uprising were clergy. In the entire course of the war, 65.8 per cent of the clergy of the dioceses of Lleida met violent deaths. The left-wing association of the Church with fascism was strengthened by papal declarations to the effect that fascism was the best weapon with which to defeat proletarian revolution and defend Christian civilization.35
The notion of purification by fire, of clearing the ground of the legacy of previous Spanish history, underlay much of the violence perpetrated by idealistic anarchists. However, it was also used as a justification of the activities of the common criminals who had been released from jail and joined the CNT –FAI’s patrols and checas. Individuals jailed for armed robbery and murder may have been simply criminals or even psychopathic monsters, but there were plenty of otherwise humanitarian anarchists who glorified them as heroes of the social struggle.36
Even without the recently freed prisoners, it would have been impossible to keep the groundswell of long-repressed anti-clerical feeling entirely in check once the restraints were off. Churches and convents were sacked and burned everywhere in the Republican zone except the Basque Country. Many were put to profane use as prisons, garages or warehouses. Acts of desecration – the shooting of statues of Jesus Christ and saints, the destruction of works of art, or the use of sacred vestments in satires of religious ceremonies – were usually symbolic and often theatrical. The most reliable study of religious persecution during the Civil War, by Monsignor Antonio Montero Moreno, calculated that 6,832 members of the clergy and religious orders were murdered or executed. Many others fled abroad. The popular hatred of the Church was the consequence both of its traditional association with the right and of the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s open legitimization of the military rebellion.
